For Halloween, I’m dressing this site up as a better version of itself, only with no concept of time. Which is to say I’m finishing up my move today (hopefully) and I don’t have access to the Internet, so I’m re-posting a bunch of old stuff that people seemed to like.

If you’re looking for a good time to tell your friends about TedQuarters, maybe do it today. Unless they’re going to expect I’ll always churn out like 8,000 words a day. In which case tell your friends to come back tomorrow when things are back to normal.

This one has to be quick. Plus I’m not even sure what’s going to suck about my new apartment yet, since I haven’t lived there. There’ll be plenty of time for complaining once I do.

Roaches: The new place is sparkling clean right now, but it seems just about inevitable that if you live in the city you’re going to see a roach in your apartment at some point or another. They come up through the pipes, I guess, or in windows or whatever. And that sucks, because roaches are awful looking. And I know they’re just stigmatized, and they’re actually clean by bug standards and don’t mean you’re going to get diseases or anything. But they’re creepy as hell, and anytime I ever saw one in my old apartment I couldn’t sleep that night.

The rent is too damn high: Seriously. I mean, we lucked into a great place that seemed downright reasonable in price compared to everything else we saw. Plus, I’m lucky to have a job in this market, and to be able to pay said rent.

But with almost every apartment search, you see a ton of places that appear only barely liveable, then just when you start bargaining with yourself and convincing yourself you could make that dirty postage-stamp of an apartment work, you find someplace way better in every way and go for it.

But someone has to live in those other apartments, right? Who’s paying so much for spaces so small? The rent is too damn high. And apparently it’s higher than ever right now, which sucks.

Brodowns: It is the Upper East Side, after all.

City living has it’s advantages.

Food: As you may have realized by now, I like eating. And though leaving the suburbs means — as mentioned earlier — I’ll have to give up grilling meat and enjoying homegrown herbs and vegetables, I should be able to make up the difference in the new location.

I know the Upper East Side isn’t exactly a hotbed of awesome culinary delights, but the whole access-to-the-subway thing makes a huge difference in the variety of food I’ll be able to eat. And while I recognize and appreciate the joy of perfecting a fried-chicken recipe through trial and error with the deep fryer, it’s better than even-money I’m never going to get it to taste better than what they serve at Hill Country Chicken.

And the variety! Near my new place there are German and Argentinean and Vietnamese places, with foods I wouldn’t even know where to start figuring out how to make myself. And somewhere near a NYC subway stop there is nearly every time of cuisine in the world available.

I expect this will mean good things for those of you who enjoy the food reviews on this site, for what it’s worth. Part of the reason it got so hard to keep up with the sandwich reviews was that I had exhausted most of the interesting sandwiches near my house in Westchester and couldn’t find time to venture out and find ones in the city. So look out for that.

Sidewalks: I love walking. When I first moved to Brooklyn I would find excuses for it: a book I wanted from a store a mile away, a cheeseburger I wanted from a White Castle even further. Then at some point I realized I needed no particular destination, and I took to wandering. Sometimes I plan it. Most times I just step outside for some reason, find the weather pleasant, realize I have nothing better to do, and set off. It’s good for thinking, plus it’s decent exercise.

In my neighborhood in the ‘burbs, though, there are very few sidewalks. That means any walking needs to be done while looking over your shoulder for oncoming cars that might hit you (like I said, there are few streetlights) or at the very least splash you with water from a nearby puddle. It’s not the type of walking conducive to thinking about much besides your own safety.

So I’m psyched to have sidewalks everywhere. I tell people it’s about a 45-minute walk from my new place to my office and they say, “yeah but you’ll never do that.” But I will. I might even do it tonight.

Time, and access to stuff with which to pass it: I used to, you know, do stuff. I’d go see my friends’ bands or check out museum exhibits I was interested in or just go meet up with people at a bar to watch a game. And while that stuff is hardly impossible to undertake while living in the suburbs, the distance — from most of my friends and from the museums and bars and everything — made it something of a pain in the ass.

The difference in commuting time means I’m going to have more than an hour and a half extra every day with which to do stuff. I’m talking a big game now and I realize I’ll probably spend most of it watching TV. But I’ll certainly write some more too — for this site and for other projects — and spend some time going out and enjoying all the awesome things the city has to offer. So that’s cool.

Right into it:

The commute: This is the big one. You tell some people you have a 50-minute train ride every day and they’ll fill you up with crap like, “oh, but that’s your time to unwind, just relax, read a book or something, and you’ll get used to it.”

No. Incorrect. My commuting time is absolutely not my own. It belongs to the lady who eats broccoli on the morning train that smells up the whole car, and to the huge guy who crams himself into the middle seat on the ride home then splays his elbows so I have to do all my reading and unwinding with my gut spilling over the armrest.

If that time — and it’s about an hour and ten minutes, door to door — were my own I could be doing so many more awesome things, like watching TV or playing the guitar or even reading and actually unwinding in the comfort of my La-Z-Boy.

Besides that, you learn to live your life on Metro-North’s schedule. If you don’t leave the house by 8:09, you can forget about that 8:16 train. Leave before 8:07 and you can stop in the deli for coffee. Make it to the first crosswalk before you see the train and you know you’ll catch it. Make it to the second crosswalk and you know you won’t have to run. Stand near the back of the train so you can exit at Grand Central North. Stand about three cars from the front on the way back so you can get off by the stairs.

There’s some grotesque pleasure in mastering the commute, but it’s the most pathetic of accomplishments.

Oh and two more things: 1) You see the same people literally every single day on the train platform, and hardly anyone ever acknowledges anybody. It’s bizarre. I mean, let’s forget about learning each other’s names because we all know we’re not planning on sitting next to each other and chatting for the whole commute. But we’re not even going to smile and nod? I see you every day!

(I should note that I say what’s up to Mike from Trainjotting when I run into him, and there’s one lady that smiles or says hello. But there are like 10 other people that I see all the time who make no effort at all.)

Oh, yeah, 2) If you’re doing something in the city, you can’t just go home. If you’re willing to pay for a cab, you can get a ride to Grand Central, then you have to sit there and wait 20 minutes like a goon until the next train to your station is leaving. I know I sound whiny right now, and I get that compared to the way people traveled for most of civilization the Metro-North is pretty damn impressive. But once you get used to living on a subway line it’s just hard to see it that way.

The car: I know I said I liked driving, and I do. I don’t like that I need to get in the car to go pretty much anywhere. You leave your house, you go right to the car. Almost always. There’s a deli and a pizzeria within walking distance, which is useful for the times my wife needs to leave me without the car. And I can walk to the train in the morning, and I guess if I wanted to figure it out I could take the train to get to stuff within walking distance of the other stops on the line.

But other than that, you need the car for getting anywhere you’re going to go. The car becomes this weird exoskeleton, something attached to you practically any time you’re more than a half mile from your home. Oh, and for some reason Westchester’s variety of tough guys love to speed through parking garages.

Stuff I need to deal with: Man, the suburbs come with a lot of stuff you need to deal with. When it snows in the city, you have to deal with stepping over the gross slushy gravy that forms at every corner. But when it snows in the suburbs, you need to endure an intense 45-minute cardio workout before you can even leave your house.

And there’s the lawn, and the heating oil, and the car needing oil change, a bunch of stuff like that. I know, I know: Not real problems. I should be happy I have heat. But I’m spoiled by years of pampered urban living.

Soon, on to the good and bad things about the city.

If you haven’t noticed, much of my attention over the past few weeks has been dedicated to the ever-harrowing but still very exciting moving process. I’m leaving the comforts of suburbia for the convenience of Manhattan this weekend.

Things might slow down here a bit for a couple of days. Monday will feature some re-posted greatest hits, my self-applauding means of introducing new readers to old content and reminding old readers about various posts they may have enjoyed in the past. By Tuesday I should be back online weighing in on all that’s new and stupid.

This is the first of a four-part series that will roll out today and tomorrow. I hope. I haven’t written any of it yet, so I reserve the right to get too busy and bail.

Almost everything about moving — in this area and on my budget, at least — involves trade-offs. To find an apartment you can afford in a desirable location, you must concede some floor space. To live someplace closer to restaurants and nightlife, you must accept more street noise. Stuff like that. I assume you’ve moved at some time in your life, so I probably don’t need to explain it in great detail.

Anyway, on the whole this move should be a net positive. But there are at least three things I’ll miss about life in suburbia. In no particular order:

The backyard: I had no idea what I intended to do in my backyard when we moved to Hawthorne a couple years ago. I just knew that after five years of living in Brooklyn I was psyched to have one. I figured I’d play more lawn games and such, though that never really happened.

It turned out my backyard was awesome for two things: barbecuing and gardening. A bunch of my friends gave me a smoker as a wedding gift, and with it I endeavored countless cooking projects. I got really good at making ribs, if I do say so myself, and developed some pretty strong barbecue instincts. I smoked briskets, chickens, pork butts and turkeys. I even made bacon once. Plus we had a small charcoal grill next to the smoker, which helped produce all sorts of delicious burgers.

More often than not, I served those meats with something from our garden. The garden ran the length of our house and got direct sunlight for most of every summer day. Our vegetables grew like tomacco. Plus, gardens are invaluable for metaphors. Just about everything in life is kind of like a garden: You put in some effort and you reap more fruit, but there’s always a lot of randomness in play.

Driving: Everything in our neck of Westchester is pretty far apart, at least compared to what I grew used to living on Long Island, in D.C. and in Brooklyn. The Taco Bell is over four miles away; the nearest retail areas are almost ten miles.

We got a new car on June 7, 2010. By the time we move into the city for good, that car will have nearly 25,000 miles on it. And we don’t often take road trips.

But I like driving, especially on the type of (normally) lightly trafficked roads you can find in Westchester. Even the local roads feature fewer stop lights than their counterparts on Long Island, and many of the parkways are hilly, scenic and ripe with interesting roadkill. I like driving aimlessly, maybe with some token errand in mind, then trying to find an alternate route home. Westchester’s pretty great for that.

The moon: I know the moon also shines over Manhattan, so don’t tell me I’m in for a pleasant surprise when I get there. Until I moved to Hawthorne I had no idea there was anyplace within 100 miles of the city so free of light pollution. Our block has one streetlight and it’s not close to our house. On clear nights, we can see all the constellations vividly, not just some hazy suggestion of Orion.

And the moon shines so brightly it casts shadows, and pours this almost eerie blue glow into our kitchen. It’s awesome. The first clear full-moon night we lived there I woke up thinking there might be a UFO overhead. It’s hard to explain. Everything looks like a Gregory Crewdson photograph.

Whoa, my memories of the suburbs are on the whole way lamer than I expected them to be. I suspect the forthcoming complaints will be a little funnier. I hope. Jeez.